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The goal seems to be to keep people in rural areas ignorant and/or sell more starlink terminals
Yeah it's 100% just a Starlink scam. The internet does not make people less ignorant, I promise.
I think it's much more likely that they want their base to keep watching cable TV
It's easy to funnel money from the rubes. It was only 2 years ago that I learned some churches will automatically withdraw tithes from your bank account and they encourage you to set up "direct deposit" with them.
The entire economic model of these loons is built on the same principle: anything you use regularly, for "free" or built with taxpayer money, should instead become a subscription service you have to pay for, to a cabal of rich sociopaths. In the meantime, the actual free option is brain rotting propaganda to keep you voting for the rich sociopaths so they can repeat step 1. See: Fox News.
Churches and other religious congregations in the US are NOT funded with taxpayers money (at least, pending Supreme Court decision on the Kansas taxpayer supported Catholic school), and pastor salary and building upkeep are very real costs. If a family values the community having employee(s) and a building, and doesn't want the hassle of other payment options, automatic debits are a good option to have available.
Things that actually are funded with taxpayer money, yes, they should be free. The Project 2025 plan to kill NOAA so weather forecasts will only be available to subscribers of private companies is incredibly destructive to such a huge number of people, and yes, this broadband decision is in that same awful category.
You misread my comment. I'm relating direct tithing to churches, to things like NOAA. That's actually an incredible example of what I'm talking about. But I'm not saying churches are taxpayer funded no.
That being said... I'm not putting it past religious fundamentalists to convince Trump to issue an executive order garnishing every American's wages in the name of tithing to the church. It would be foul, and fucked, but the last 6 months have given me an ample imagination.
Isn't the fact that they get a tax credit kinda means they get that money through?
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Deny social security
ding, ding, ding! close rural offices, make phone support unworkable with additional staff cuts and deadend "AI" phone IVR and finally ensure that online interactions are impossible.
hundreds of billions will be saved on the bodies of dead Americans to help pay for those trillionaire tax cuts.
Giving rural old white farmers broadband is racist?
let them eat starlink!
This is probably the whole point.
This should be written down for the saying of this time in history
Stupid is as stupid votes.
GodDAMN! This has been getting a shit tonne of mileage lately!
Probably shouldn't have called it Digital Equity Internet. I could see where the confusion comes in.
They need to keep their base stupid.
Doesn't seem like they need to work very hard at it tbh.
Fair point
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This will be just great for the Appalachian region J.D. Vance was playing up as his homeland.
They could have really used that money to get some broadband deployed and a workforce trained up: https://communitynetworks.org/content/connect-humanity-project-aims-bring-broadband-rural-appalachia
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I suppose this means he hates the Rural Electrification Act and wants to retroactively rip out the bumpkins' power lines. I should probably shut my pie hole before I inadvertently give these malicious assholes ideas.
Or do give them ideas, so the rurals can have the day they voted for and maybe, just maybe, figure out billionaires despise them.
Did he just look at the word "equity" and assume it somehow helped minorities? That's the only reason I can imagine him calling it racist.
Yes, yes that is exactly what has been happening. This is not the only example of them doing Ctrl+f and ending grants.
In Canada, we just give them the money, they twiddle their thumbs for a few years then say they're abandoning the project and keep the money. Then we wait a few years, and decide to give them more money for the same thing again.
They’ve already done that here once before in the US, too.
10 billion dollars to redefine 5g as 1/10th it's original bandwidth and then not meet the standards of providing it anyway.
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But... but... rural is white Trump country. They need the interweb tubes.
All those red counties can keep enjoying paying over $100 a month for terrible local cable company "100mbps" (20mbps in reality) download speeds with 56k upload. That's the great America they wanted after all. Meanwhile in my very blue city I pay $60 a month for symmetric gigabit.
I used to have $120/month wireless net (dish aimed at a tower on the mountain) that was 15gbps. Then the city seized the abandoned fibre Comcast ran and abandoned. They brought in another company to run the internet (despite saying they were going to make it a utility run by the city). I suspect my $55/month bill for gigabit net is fixing to at least double now.
Have fun watching diabetes commercials on cable while the rest of us enjoy what we want on streaming platforms.
Not even going to bother addressing the veteran stuff. Trump hating the military and its personnel is old news and his voters couldn't give a flying fuck.
It must literally just be the word "equity".
I really hope that someone is collecting all the laws that Trump is making up on the fly so that we can compare the documents; at least do a word count of Trump's collected laws and covfefe vs the Constitution.
His boyfriend must be complaining because it doesn't benefit Starlink or something
Does this create communication blund spots? Because that's dangerously good preperation for gulags or something
Just a couple weeks ago, with the announcement of orders being opened to the public, people in my (pretty red) area were celebrating the expected arrival of broadband from these grants,
Wonder if its going to happen now. 🤦
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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